


so let us melt

by ala



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ala/pseuds/ala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The heart speaks in poetry. Raleigh not so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so let us melt

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd. I apologize ahead of time for any mistakes and confusion and thank you for pointing them out to me.

Raleigh had never been particularly good in school—a childhood spend moving from military base to military base around the world didn’t exactly make for a consistent education. However he did remember one high school lit class where the teacher had gone on and on about some Shakespeare poem or other.  She had brought in one of the old-fashioned compasses they used in math class to demonstrate the poem’s metaphor, showing how the center arm stayed in one place and turned with the outside arm, the outside arm always leaning towards the center. A few of the girls in the class had sighed over the romance, but sixteen-year-old Raleigh had thought it was one of the dumbest things he had ever heard.

Over a decade later and he was in a room that surprisingly was not in a Shatterdome, sleeping in a bed that was actually wide enough for two people. Not that that the other person sharing the bed seemed to know that—Mako had somehow wedged herself under his arm and half on his chest and was presently using his bicep as both a pillow and a teddy bear. If he hadn’t lost so much of the sensation in the arm already he was certain it would have been extremely uncomfortable. But it was Mako, so he wouldn’t have dislodged her for anything short of the reopening of the Breach.

While she seemed to be well on her way to a peaceful night’s rest he was in the frustrating place between sleep and wakefulness where sleep was just beyond his grasp. There was a time when Raleigh could fall asleep and wake with the ease of flipping a light switch, but that was before Yancy died, and while he’d gotten better since he met Mako there were occasionally still nights like this.

Closing his eyes, he tried one of the techniques the base shrink had suggested: clearing his mind and just let everything flow over him, like a one-person Drift. He was listening to the even sounds of Mako’s breathing as she fell asleep when the memory of that day in high school floated to the surface of his mind and suddenly he _got_ it. What that poet was trying to say to his lover and why he wanted to say it.

He wasn’t aware of making any noise or movement but suddenly Mako shifted next to him.

“Go to sleep,” she mumbled into his arm, “You are thinking too loudly. Late.” She muttered something else in Japanese that was little more than a slur of sounds.

He knew that he shouldn’t disturb her more than he already had, but now that he knew he had to tell her.

“Hey Mako,” he whispered a little too loudly. She attempted to press her face further into the muscle of his arm. “You’re the other half of my compass.”

That didn’t come out right.

Apparently she agreed, because she craned her neck around to look up at him blearily.

“What? I point north?”

“Not that kind of compass. The other kind, the kind they use in geometry. You’re the center and guide me on the way around.”

She rolled over so her chin was resting on his chest. Her eyes still had most of the softness of sleep as she gazed up at him with an adorably skeptical look on her face.

“I’ve been in your head and still that doesn’t make any sense.”

Raleigh wasn’t sure if he _could_ make sense with this, but since he had already interrupted her sleep over it he might as well fully commit to the metaphor.

“You’re my center, my fixed point, the one I will always turn towards you and you are home. Even without the drift I’m always connected to you and I never want to let go,” he told the ceiling, too nervous to look at Mako while trying to explain his feelings through poetry she had never heard of.

God, that was cheesy. Maybe he should have listened to his sixteen-year-old self. He risked a peek at her face; her eyes were closed. Hopefully she had fallen asleep again and hadn’t heard him embarrass himself. He flung his arm over his eyes and wished for a something—a convenient kaiju attack maybe—to suddenly draw him away.

A hand grabbed his and pulled it off his face. When he opened his eyes it was to see Mako staring up at him, eyes gleaming in the low light.

“Raleigh? I love you too.”

His face hurt from the sudden grin; he never tired of hearing her say that.

She crawled up and gave him a slow kiss on the lips, then another, and another. For a moment they had the potential to become more heated, but she gave him one last lingering kiss and settled down again to rest against his chest.

 “Now go to sleep,” she gently ordered.

“I can’t,” he admitted.

She shook her head and threaded her fingers with his.

“I’m your compass, right? Now let me guide you.”

Together they drifted off to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem in question is not by Shakespeare at all, but rather the later poet John Donne, entitled "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and is one of my favorites. The text in its entirety:
> 
> As virtuous men pass mildly away,  
> And whisper to their souls to go,  
> Whilst some of their sad friends do say,  
> "The breath goes now," and some say, "No," 
> 
> So let us melt, and make no noise,  
> No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;  
> 'Twere profanation of our joys  
> To tell the laity our love. 
> 
> Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,  
> Men reckon what it did and meant;  
> But trepidation of the spheres,  
> Though greater far, is innocent. 
> 
> Dull sublunary lovers' love  
> (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit  
> Absence, because it doth remove  
> Those things which elemented it. 
> 
> But we, by a love so much refined  
> That our selves know not what it is,  
> Inter-assured of the mind,  
> Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. 
> 
> Our two souls therefore, which are one,  
> Though I must go, endure not yet  
> A breach, but an expansion.  
> Like gold to airy thinness beat. 
> 
> If they be two, they are two so  
> As stiff twin compasses are two:  
> Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show  
> To move, but doth, if the other do; 
> 
> And though it in the center sit,  
> Yet when the other far doth roam,  
> It leans, and hearkens after it,  
> And grows erect, as that comes home. 
> 
> Such wilt thou be to me, who must,  
> Like the other foot, obliquely run;  
> Thy firmness makes my circle just,  
> And makes me end where I begun. 
> 
> The compass that the poem and Raleigh reference is not a magnetic compass that points north, but rather a divider caliper, or a [drafting compass](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass_\(drafting\)).


End file.
